by John Addiego
Penny breathed deeply into her thoughts. She had the sensation of taking breath into the hidden places of her being, as if there were pulmonary recesses which housed memory, a grandfather falling dead, a beautiful child running on the beach, a brother whose mind was wounded by war, a darkly handsome father who’d left her mother for a woman near her own age. As she worked to let her body relax on the nearly empty vessel, staying aware of the spinning wheels on the rails and the whistling brakes, she saw, among the images of memory, a garish image of Jesus Christ from her aunt’s calendar. This Jesus had a wrestler’s muscular neck and a halo floating above his orange-brown hair at a slight angle, like a glowing UFO banking for a turn. A confectionary neon heart shone like a wild-cherry cough drop through his breast. Penny laughed and opened her eyes just as the streetcar stopped.
A young person with a dark face, with prominent cheeks and lustrous black hair falling across them in a feminine way, leaned against a lamppost just beyond her window. Male or female in the loose blouse and harem pants, she couldn’t tell, but there was something beautiful and familiar in this person’s face. Through the glass their eyes met, and Penny’s heart jumped, and as the pneumatic door snapped shut and the car lurched forward she mouthed his name, and he nodded. Both of them opened their mouths and pointed as the train swiftly drew them apart, the one who had stood on the Golden Gate Bridge an hour earlier and decided against death by the direction of a bird’s flight and the other who’d returned in thought to that hidden mesa at the end of the world where a mother and child huddled under a blue poncho and waited for the shadow of death to pass over.
MISTER SANTA CLAUS
Mickey
Michelle Verbicaro, always called Mickey by everybody all her life, had an extra chromosome and a puppy with the same name as the president’s wife. She had a sister in college, a brother in the marines, and a funny older brother and baby sister who still lived at home. Mickey had the slightly Asiatic eyes, round face, and slumped shoulders of most people with Down syndrome, and she had thick, lustrous black hair which her mother kept trimmed in a bowl cut, and a laugh which was so contagious that an usher at the Oaks Theater in Berkeley often warned the projectionist to adjust the volume whenever Mickey arrived for a matinee.
One Saturday in the last month of the year, between the two turkey dinners, Mickey and Lady-Bird sneaked out for a walk while her mother was at the Lucky Store, and they talked the entire way about Mr. Santa Claus, who would be holding children on his lap at Hink’s and listening to them speak of whatever their hearts desired. Mickey’s heart had a big list, and this would be a special Christmas with the whole family there, and she had photographs of herself over the years sitting on Santa’s lap, but none since she’d reached age fourteen because of a rule her mother had told her about, which she considered a dopy rule. She walked through her neighborhood of stucco houses in El Cerrito, past her Aunt Francesca’s and Nona Rosari’s and the homes of about seven other aunts and cousins, to the north edge of Berkeley.
It was a gray day with occasional showers, just Mickey and Lady-Bird’s favorite walking weather because nothing felt better when you were trudging along than a cold rain on your face. They made it to the top of Solano Avenue, where the theater was, and continued the only way Mickey knew to go, which was through the streetcar tunnel. This scared Lady-Bird so much that Mickey had to carry her. By the time they made it to the downtown Mickey’s feet were sore, so she took off her shoes and soaked her feet in a gutter which flowed with rainwater and hot-dog wrappers.
Mr. Santa Claus looked regal and thrilling at the end of the line of kids and parents in the opulent department store, but when she got closer she thought he’d lost weight and a certain spunk over the years. His eyes darted back and forth as her turn approached. He laughed without the big, throaty ho-ho-ho. When her turn came he put his hands up the way you let a dog know you won’t bite them if they won’t bite you, and his voice sounded like one of her dad’s friends’ at the card table late at night, kind of mean and impatient. No way, he said. You are too big and too . . . huge, in fact. This is for the little guys. You wanna break my kneecaps, Cookie? So solly. No can do. Please make room for the next customer.
Lady-Bird was licking her own pee-hole when Mickey came out to the sidewalk, bawling, wishing she were as small as Lady-Bird herself. The two of them started for home and got a ride from her cousin Susan, who, among three other relatives, had been driving around for hours looking for her. Holy smoke, what happened, Mickey-Wicky? You’re soaked to the skin!
Mickey told her about Santa Claus, and Susan called Santa something which she’d never heard from a girl cousin, and she drove fast to Mickey’s house. Mickey’s mother’s eyes were like a raccoon’s when she ran up to hug her, and her mom and cousin were both crying with her and now and then saying mad things about Santa when her father, Joe, came home and said, Let me take care of this.
Joe had just left Spenger’s Fish Grotto, where he and the secretary from a local hardware store, Julie, had spent an hour with her hand on his leg talking about business. It felt good to have a legitimate reason to leave the house before his wife could ask him why he avoided her eyes and smelled of booze and scampi, and he drove to Hink’s and spoke with the manager, who called Santa from his chair to an office upstairs. Yeah? Santa said.
Bernie, the manager said, I’m sorry. Listen, Bernie, I thought you should talk with this gentleman.
Joe apologized before he told Santa that he’d apparently made his daughter, who was mentally a little slow, cry. Maybe it was the way he’d spoken to her?
Santa didn’t seem to know what he was talking about at first, but then he sort of remembered this huge retarded girl, all right. Joe could smell the sour beer and mustard on the guy’s breath. I’m supposed to hold giant retards on my lap? Santa asked the manager.
Calm down, Bernie. The manager wiped his brow with a handkerchief.
Joe sized Santa up. Even through the cotton beard and padded velvet suit he could see that the guy was about ten years his junior, but Joe figured he could cut the suds-guzzling smart aleck in half with a couple of punches. I’m not your employer, he said, but if I was I’d kick your ass with your last paycheck right now.
Santa told him to perform an impossible sex act upon himself, and his black gloves at the ends of the furry white cuffs made fists. The manager, a nervous, balding man, stepped between them. Joe smiled and very slowly took off his sport coat and rolled his sleeves to the elbow. He held his chin up and smiled, and while his feet slid into the stance he’d boxed from years ago, his hands remained open, beckoning. Come on, he thought, give me your best shot, Fat Man. The manager convinced Santa that it was time for him to get back to work, but not before the man in the stuffed red suit had compared Joe to a part of the human anatomy used in excretion.
That guy is an embarrassment to Christmas. Joe put his coat back on.
He’s a nephew to one of the owners, the manager said.
Ah. Joe thought of his brothers, Narciso and Ludovico, one thick as a fence post, the other about as calm as a bantam rooster. I’m sorry. He’s going to get a candy cane up his ass if he’s not careful.
The manager laughed and mopped his brow.
The world was spinning off-kilter for Joe of late, and it wasn’t just the gin and tonics from the fish grotto or the fact that he’d been an inch from getting into a fight with Kris Kringle. Sometimes he would cruise along the freeway and imagine how simple it would be to let the wheel drift a little and plow into a concrete wall. Sometimes the only thing in the world which made him happy was the only thing which made him want to drive his car through concrete at sixty miles an hour, and that was his attraction to Julie, a woman barely older than his daughter Penny.
A decade earlier he had counted himself among the luckiest of men, but something about the mid-’60s gave him a feeling of disgust and exhilaration at the same time. He tried to figure this out as he crept through the downtown traffic, and he took a long
detour in order to figure some more. Hell, he wasn’t hungry, anyway, and sometimes sitting at the dinner table made him nauseated. Mickey had an excuse for eating like a slob, but Angelo, who was now in high school, was the worst, especially when they ate at Joe’s mother’s with the whole clan. Maybe it was that his first two, his beautiful oldest girl and his quiet, athletic son, were both gone from the house. More than that, one was now an angry college student who hung out with long-haired beatniks while her brother, Joe’s pride and joy, had lost the light of happiness in his face.
That was it, he thought: they were a couple of sobersides, and the few times he’d seen them in the past three years neither one of them had been able to laugh. Of course they were sitting on opposite sides of the fence, and if you believed the papers they had a lot of company on each side of that fence, but one thing Joe had realized about living, and this was something which Julie had helped him realize, was that if you can’t get a kick out of it now and then you may as well give it up. A lifetime of being the serious one in a family of loud laughers and wine drinkers, of being the guy who worried about every yard of material and every margin of profit for an extended family which reaped the benefits of his fretting, had brought him to this point at midlife where he felt obliged to live it up now and then. Get out and dance at one of those damned go-go places Julie liked. Take a weekend at South Tahoe with the brothers and slip away to meet Julie for lunch.
Okay, the lying was a big piece of his feeling off-kilter. His pop had chased women and ended up living with a little Mexican whore his last couple of years, and Joe always used the old man as the yardstick of negative integers in the measure of a man, but here he was spending time with a girl who didn’t know who Douglas MacArthur or Benny Goodman were. Although it was still just friendship, it confused the hell out of him. That love was a messy thing, that it didn’t always play by the rules, was common coinage of the times, particularly this era of bushy sideburns and short skirts, but it didn’t take the sting away from Joe’s duplicity, and it didn’t help him understand his love for his oldest children, which had nothing messy about it now but felt frozen and out of grasp.
The house resonated with Burl Ives singing about a little drummer boy, and even this popular carol seemed off-track to Joe. Mary nodded, barrumpapumpum, the ox’s ass kept time, barrumpapum-pum? He wouldn’t say that, would he? There seemed to be a new liberality in common language which struck Joe between the eyes now and then. People said things on TV you would have heard only in a locker room a few years earlier. Billboards looked pornographic. As Joe stepped inside he heard a high-pitched, whining cry weave itself into the music, and as he entered the living room a soldier stood up from the couch and extended his hand. It was his son.
Hey! Joe reached to give him a hug. He felt stiff, all sinew and bone, and his face looked gaunt and bruised around the eyes.
Dad.
How’s it going, Tiger?
All right.
How much time off did Uncle give you?
A month.
That’s great!
I’m only here a couple of days, though. What’s eating Mickey?
For a moment Joe was at a loss for words. His wife, Mary Louise, stepped into the room and told the Santa Claus story, including the part about Joe’s going downtown to talk with the manager. Mickey’s whining underscored the nasal voice on the phonograph record.
Joe started to tell them both how close he had been to fistfighting with Kris Kringle, but his son’s last words kept interfering with his thoughts. A couple of days out of a month? A horn sounded in their driveway, and Paulie stepped briskly to the door. These were some buddies who wanted him to show them around Frisco, he told his parents.
You’re not going to eat at your grandmother’s?
Probably not, Mom. I told these guys I’d show them Frisco, and they’re going to show me Dago and Ensenada.
Paulie, what the hell do you mean, Dago?
Dad, that’s San Diego. I’ll be back tonight.
Burl Ives kept crooning about that goddamned drummer boy playing his nuts off for Jesus as Joe watched his son climb into a green car filled with boys in uniform and the ox’s ass kept time on the backbeat. His wife was yammering, something about never even looking into her eyes. Joe, she said, are you listening to me?
Going to show me Dago, he said.
You don’t look in my eyes, either, she said.
Joe was awake at midnight, on his side, facing away from Mary. He was awake two hours later when he heard a car pull up and the front door open and close. Joe crept downstairs. His son had placed the couch cushions on the floor and unrolled a smelly sleeping bag. Why the hell don’t you sleep in your own bed? Joe asked.
Paulie said he didn’t want to wake up Angelo and besides, he was used to the bag. He reeked of cigarette smoke and booze. Joe watched him slide out of his pants and into the musty bag. His legs were thin and pimply, and even the boy’s underwear was olive-drab colored. Joe sat on the couch frame and cleared his throat. Your mother and I want to know your plans, he said.
Day after tomorrow, Paulie said. He yawned luxuriously. We fly south out of Travis. Lay on the beach. These guys saved my fucking life, Dad.
Could you watch your goddamned language? Joe asked.
Sorry. I’m bushed, Dad. I am really sorry.
Joe sat for another ten minutes wanting to say many things which seemed stuck in his throat. His son started snoring, and Joe hit the light switch.
He couldn’t sleep. Dinner at his mother’s had felt disjointed by the conspicuous absence of the war hero, by the defensive expression on Penny’s face whenever Paulie was mentioned by Ludovico or Gino, by the whimpering of Mickey and the recounting of the Santa Claus story. Joe’s brother Narciso was particularly agitated by Saint Nick’s poor treatment of little Mickey, who weighed in at a good fifty pounds more than Narciso himself. Mary had drunk too much and said too much, Penny had said something snide about the government, and Angelo had taken that opportunity to do his impersonation of President Johnson’s Texas twang: Let us all ree-zin to-gay-ther, mah fellah Amer-kins.
There was a phone in the basement, and Joe wrapped himself in a towel and started to dial Julie’s number, then decided she might hate him for it at this ungodly hour, and not just because it would shake her from a deep sleep but also because it would show a weakness of his character. He went back to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of brandy, then climbed back into his marriage bed.
A few hours later Joe was back in the basement with a cup of instant java and the towel over his shoulders. Julie sounded sleepy and soft. I needed to hear your voice, Joe told her.
They talked on for a while, and while they talked Mickey got up and padded to the kitchen in her blue Chinatown pajamas. She had a phone number for the North Pole which the paper had published last week, but when she picked up the kitchen phone she heard her father’s voice. He sounded strange. A woman’s voice was there, too, and they said things to each other about weird things, about how she wished he could get his shit together, about how he wished he could hold her on his lap. Mickey thought of sitting on Santa’s lap and saying what you wished for, and she said, Daddy, why are you wishing for that? and then the phone went dead. She listened to the silent chamber of the phone and tried to dial Santa’s workshop at the North Pole, then set the phone down. She walked into the living room where the sleeping bag with her brother in it filled most of the space and leaned over Paulie to ask him to help with the phone.
In an instant her head was slammed onto the carpet. Both of her arms were twisted behind her back, and several places in her body were in pain, but the wind was knocked out of her stomach so her mouth couldn’t scream.
A moment later her brother released her. He knelt beside her and said, Oh, Mickey, fuck me, man, goddamn it, I am so fucking sorry.
And her father was there an instant later, kneeling beside them on the floor as she started bawling, and then her mother and other brother and baby
sister stampeding down the stairs like horses while Paulie leaned against the couch frame in his green underwear and muttered curse words at his own feet.
They took Mickey to the doctor, and her mother said she’d fallen off the garage roof, and the doctor said her shoulder was dislocated. Paulie was gone by the time they returned, and so was her dad, and she wondered about the telephone and the line to call to make a wish, and why her father had been wishing with some woman, but the doctor’s pills made her so sleepy she stopped wondering, and about the time she took her coat off she was falling asleep.
She could hear her sister when she woke up. Her sister Penny was talking with her mother about Paulie, and Mickey thought then that she should live with Penny from now on, in an apartment near the college in San Francisco, so she’d be safe from Paulie.